


skip a hit, don't make a sound

by orphan_account



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen, platonic curmudgeonly best friends, rickrolling your romantic tropes forever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-21
Updated: 2013-06-21
Packaged: 2017-12-15 16:39:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/851691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is all at once a gentleman and a villain; unflinchingly reckless and often belligerent, but more than a little kind, too. Behind those shutters he puts up there sits a person who just can’t bear the thought of making a tortoise into soup.</p>
            </blockquote>





	skip a hit, don't make a sound

**Author's Note:**

> this show is much more excellent at subversion than i am.
> 
> also, i definitely stole tete de veau from tonight's hannibal finale and this might as well be titled 'sherlock and joan are bratty brats at each other' bc that's all that happens. it's more of a collection of scenes than a cohesive fic so... i'm sorry... about that (not actually sorry)

There are few things Joan Watson has ever been truly certain about in her life.

 

Absolutely none of them have involved platonically cohabitating with a strange British man who works for the police and used to abuse narcotics, but this is where she finds herself.

Living with Sherlock Holmes has turned from duty to choice; a job to a partnership, and his presence in her life has become a constant; normal. Safe. She has always been good at her job; bringing addicts back into the world and helping them find their feet. But there has always been a measure of distance, the subconscious reminder to always look out for herself and not let her guard down.

Sherlock, for all his prickles and obstinance, quietly let her feel at home with him, held out a hand for her to hold after a city full of family and friends took theirs away. Sherlock didn’t really care that she wasn’t a surgeon anymore, he only cared that she was there and that she makes him better.

 

Still, living with him is trying more often than it is not.

 

 

 

 

Sherlock, it turns out, is deathly afraid of spiders. The first encounter she has with this fear is a decidedly dramatic shriek from the bathroom and then the appearance of Sherlock – wide-eyed and indignant – in her doorway. She puts down her book.

“That noise was you?”

“There’s a spider on the shower curtain.”

“And?”

“I need you to get it _off_.”

Joan rolls her eyes, dismissive. “Do it yourself.”

“I…” Sherlock huffs, frustrated, and his hands ball into fists. “It—I don’t _like_ spiders.”

Realizing he’s not going to give in without an argument, Joan reluctantly hauls herself out of bed and breezes past him to the bathroom. She hears him follow cautiously behind.

The spider is no bigger than a quarter, but Sherlock stays safely on the hall side of the doorway, rocking up on the balls of his feet as she puts her hands on her hips and stares at the shower curtain. “ _This_ ,” she says, and it’s a sigh and a question and that strange little flicker of endearment she feels at the wildly varying aspects of his personality. Sherlock is all at once a gentleman and a villain; unflinchingly reckless and often belligerent, but more than a little kind, too. Behind those shutters he puts up there sits a person who just can’t bear the thought of making a tortoise into soup. Joan knows now that he’s stopped hiding quite as much around her, that his lies are mostly in jest. _I am better with you, Watson_.

“I wish I could explain to you why they cause such a violent involuntary reaction in me but I find it baffling myself. Logically there’s nothing to fear from many spiders, they are more helpful than harmful in many cases and this one isn’t even particularly _big_ , comparatively, I just—”

“Sherlock, it’s fine. I’ll get it out.”

He breathes an audible sigh of relief. “My Lady and Saviour, Watson.”

“Is that how you’re gonna introduce me on cases now?” she asks, picking up an old newspaper from under the sink and stepping into the bath.

“I could do,” he replies, and she can feel him watching her as she manoeuvres the spider and all its legs onto the newspaper, too curious to let his fear get in the way.

She turns, holds her arm outstretched. “What do you want me to do with it now?”

Sherlock jumps back, grimacing. “Put it out the window, flush it down the toilet, set it on fire, I don’t care. Just take it away.”

The spider finds a new home outside, and Sherlock already has most of his clothes off by the time she turns back from the window.

Normalcy.

 

 

 

 

She still doesn’t like the days where she has to hassle him to eat. It just reminds her of getting to know him, his pushing her away and trying to keep her out of any spaces inside his head. The days he won’t eat often coincide with days he doesn’t talk, remaining prone to bouts of moody silence, and when she sometimes finds a coffee sitting on her bedside table as she wakes up it’s almost ominous instead of comforting. It’s like his calling card for being up all night, and she feels a strange sense of guilt for not being up with him, supporting his madness with her own as he stares at a wall decorated with the macabre.

These are the mornings she makes toast, plants herself in front of him like she’s scaring off a bear, and holds up a plate. She says nothing out loud but she is telling him: even if you don’t leave this room today you’re eating what’s on this plate or I am feeding it to you myself. He knows this because it’s happened before, and she knows he literally never wants to hear the words _here comes the train_ again in his life.

The relapses aren’t a worry anymore, though, she believes him when he says he’s done because Sherlock is smart enough to make the distinction between his mind on drugs and his mind without. Now she just worries about him simply functioning as a human being – eating, sleeping, getting enough Vitamin D so he doesn’t turn into a cave troll. Three bowls of cereal is still better than thin air, and sitting on the roof to look over Brooklyn with a cup of cold tea, even if it’s for three hours in the dead of winter, makes her feel like he might survive the world a little longer.

 

 

The one time he makes _her_ food, she’s beyond bewildered.

A few days before she had awoken to a sore throat and a headache that threatened to split her head in two, groaning under the covers. When she met Sherlock in the hallway, he had visibly recoiled, remarked that he hoped she didn’t have the plague, and disappeared downstairs.

She hadn’t seen him since, and apart from his incurable stomping up the stairs he’d been peculiarly quiet.

But the evening her fever breaks she wanders downstairs in an old robe he’d given her a few weeks ago, and when he sees her he leaps to his feet like he’s been expecting her arrival.

“Shouldn’t you be wearing socks?” he asks, instead of inquiring after how she’s feeling. She looks at her feet.

“Probably.”

Bemused and groggy, she watches him dig around behind the armchair before a lumpy pair of socks narrowly miss her face.

“Those are clean but they might have a box of matches in them,” he says, and strides into the kitchen.

There is a box of matches in them, but they aren’t in a box and proceed to spill all over the floor. “Sherlock,” she says with half a voice. “Why.”

She sits to put the socks on, ignoring the scattered matches, then shuffles into the kitchen where Sherlock is chopping an assortment of sad-looking vegetables. It’s simultaneously sweet and unfortunate how bad he is at it, but she says nothing because he has a look of deep concentration etched across his face. She sits next to him at the table instead, comforted by the simple presence of another human being and not just an increasingly uninhabitable bed, and lets her eyes glaze over as she watches him.

“Sick people should be given soup, should they not?” he asks, and there’s a note of unease in his voice that Joan can tell he’s trying to hide.

“You’re making me soup?” She tries not to sound delighted, but soup might as well be tete de veau for how much effort Sherlock bothers to put into making food.

“I didn’t realize you were such a fan.”

He dumps the contents of the chopping board in a pot on the stove, and Joan follows him over, intrigued. The broth – if you could call it that – is sadder than the vegetables.

“How much stock did you put in there?”

He huffs. “If I wanted your critique, Watson, I would have asked for it.” A pause. “Where is it?” he asks, with more than a hint of irritation. She opens a cabinet, and tries to reach up on her toes to pull it down off the shelf.

“I’m going to install a stepladder,” Sherlock murmurs, gently pressing her out of the way and reaching over her head to pull out the box of stock cubes. “How many of these?”

“Two.”

She doesn’t interrupt him anymore, tired from all the movement after three days in bed, and it feels as though a thick fog is forming behind her eyes. She yawns. Sherlock rolls his eyes.

“Go back to bed, Watson. I can’t carry you up the stairs.”

“I have to change my sheets,” Joan grumbles, but heeds him and trudges back up to her room, sighing as she sees the rumpled mess of her bed. It’s too hard, and she simply flops down and falls asleep almost instantly.

 

When she wakes again it’s because Sherlock is shaking her, and she winces as she feels with perfect clarity the toll her neck has taken falling asleep in such an awkward position. 

He holds out a hand. “I didn’t think I could hear you exerting the required amount of strength to change an entire set of sheets on your bed by yourself. Mostly because you don’t currently have any strength. Come on.”

Joan frowns. “Thanks,” she says, offended, but takes his hand and lets him lead her up the hall.

The bed in his room is neatly made, soup and tea steam enticingly on the nightstand, and there are actual real curtains hung and closed over the windows.

“You did all this for me?” she asks.

“Well you know me, Watson, I rarely sleep at all, let alone in a bed.”

She won’t argue with that. “It still feels like an imposition.”

Sherlock shakes his head, rocks on his feet. “I insist. I shall remain as capable of surviving without a bed as I do with one.”

Her thank you is genuine this time, and he hovers uncomfortably as she settles herself. Cradling her soup bowl, she glances at him. “You can sit if you want,” she says, a little confused.

“Thank you,” he says with relief, “I have to say you incapacitation has left me rather bereaved these last few days. I almost resorted to striking up a conversation with our patched up friend Angus this morning.”

Joan smiles as Sherlock makes himself comfortable on her other side, clearly not going anywhere. “You missed me?”

“ _Yes_ , Watson, if you must word it like that. I missed you; you’ve become a very solid sounding board, and you’re nigh on useless when unconscious from a fever.”

Letting that one go, she manages another few spoonfuls of Sherlock’s surprisingly palatable soup and sets the bowl down, still exhausted. Sinking further into the covers, she angles herself towards him and watches the rhythmic tap over his fingers over his knee.

“Would you like me to tell you what I’ve been working on?” he asks, propping a pillow up behind his shoulders.

Joan nods, the fog returning. “Just leave out anything that involves messes I’m going to have to clean up later.”

“If I recall _you_ were the one who recently spilled a box full of matches all over our living room floor, not me.”

Joan frowns, but doesn’t reply. Within a minute, she’s asleep.

 

This time when she wakes it’s late and Sherlock is sleeping peacefully next to her, long fingers clasped over his stomach. She rubs an eye, and pulls the blanket from the end of the bed haphazardly over his legs, then turns over and goes right back to sleep, his continued presence more of a pleasant sedative than any medicine could provide.

 

She gets better, but after that night it seems as though something else has peeled away, another of Sherlock’s armoured layers has been left to rust with the others he’s discarded. Joan doesn’t tell him, but she missed him too.

 

 

 

It’s strange when there are other people in the house. _Their_ house, it feels like when there are more people than just them, taking up space in their shared sanctuary that they spend so much time navigating around each other in. Most of the time she just comes home to Sherlock having spread some new obsession all over the floor somewhere, like coming home to a dog that’s ripped up all the couch cushions again; but when she comes home to find strangers (or men in her bedroom), it’s more like an invasion that she feels on behalf of the both of them.

She has become both more and less attached to the company of others living with Sherlock. She is attached to _his_ company, the spells of almost clingy conversation, the surliness and contrariness and everything in between – he can be so many different people that it makes her feel less and less like she needs anyone else. Her therapist would probably hate that, she thinks, the thought of Joan hiding away in a rundown brownstone with only the company of an ex-drug addict and his wandering mind. But it doesn’t feel unhealthy to her – she still runs errands, still leaves the house every day, thinks about calling Emily (doesn’t) – it feels like a routine; stable. Safe. Sometimes her and Sherlock have entire conversations with their mouths full while they extrapolate information about a case; occasionally she walks in to find him fast asleep on the floor or their fireplace filled with road salt, but that’s all it makes her feel. _Safe_.

 

His particular brand of impertinence has started to rub off on her, though.

 

 

 

After spending so much time around his sudden whims and desires, the decision to make him give her a tattoo doesn’t come from a wealth of long-term consideration.

She just walks into the kitchen in her pajamas one morning to Sherlock and a bowl of bran flakes and says, “I want a tattoo.”

It feels like being eight years old and standing on the linoleum of her parents’ kitchen, stating boldly that she was going to buy a pony with her allowance. There exists in this moment the same level of naivety and sinking realization that what she’s saying might not be quite right. The words feel strange in her mouth, but to his credit Sherlock doesn’t laugh at her the way her mother did.

“What do you want? A Chinese character meaning ‘lucky’? Anchor and your mother’s name? …Tramp stamp?”

Joan closes her eyes. “This was a mistake.”

Sherlock stands abruptly, like she’s going to walk out on him, and his cereal bowl rocks ominously on the table. “Watson, it would be my honour to give you your first _ink_. I apologize for mocking you. However, if you’ll permit me to ask: is there any particular reason you decided this at six o’clock in the morning?”

She shakes her head.

“Perfect! Where are we going to put it?”

 

He takes her to the office, sets up his tools and the needle and finds a blank sheet of paper, flicking a pencil between his fingers as he waits for her to explain what she wants.

“The rod of Asclepius.”

“Ah, the symbol of healing and medicine; oft confused with the caduceus of Hermes. Is it going to be holding a magnifying glass to allude to your new career as a detective?”

“Snakes don’t have hands, and don’t make fun of me. I left that world behind but I’d still like something to remember it by.”

“I’m not trying to make fun of you, Watson. Maybe you can have the magnifying glass tattoo if you decide to ditch me for an exciting new career. Lifesaving, perhaps.”

Joan rolls her eyes. “I’m shocked, I never thought you’d figure out my dream job.”

He smiles, a brief flash of genuine amusement, then hunches over the paper to sketch something out for her. It’s less rigid than what she envisioned, a slightly more sensual version of the symbol she still has a fair few complicated feelings about.

She points to her inner arm, just above the crease of her elbow. “Here.”

Their knees bump as he rolls his chair in closer, and he lets out a huff of indignance as though the fact that she has legs is an entirely unacceptable inconvenience, and handles her into a better position for him to work as closely as possible to her arm with little discomfort afforded to either of them. One of her legs hooks over his, her arm on the table, and his closeness feels loud – the heat of his thighs under the back of her knee and the press of his fingers into her forearm; the faint, comforting smell of laundry detergent lingering on his shirt.

“You want it what, an inch tall? Easy enough to keep covered in case you need to be professional or around your mother?”

Joan narrows her eyes, but nods.

He disinfects her skin, draws the design on, and then looks up at her, searching. The needle buzzes.

“Do it,” she says, and it sounds almost like a dare.

 

She won’t admit it hurts, just grits her teeth and stares him down when his gaze flicks up to her face. Despite the several needles jabbing rapidly into her skin, he is supremely gentle, his free hand reassuring where it sits gripping her upper arm.

Joan never usually pays all that much attention to how much space people take up around her, she’s used to being small – especially working with Sherlock – but with him this close to her she’s suddenly aware of how much bigger than her he is. She focuses on the warm span of his fingers around her bicep; the veins travelling up his arm from his wrist. His proximity is odd, but comforting. He is not a man of tactile gestures to show affection, the only reason he ever usually touches her is to drag her around crime scenes or blizzards, and she forgets what it’s like sometimes just to have some kind of physicality with another person.

Sherlock wipes the excess ink off her skin and carefully bandages the tattoo. “Welcome to your rebellious new life of body modification. What should we do next; a lip piercing?”

She chuckles, and apparently satisfied Sherlock unceremoniously shoves her leg off his thigh and stands, looking about ready to run a marathon on pure nervous energy. It’s almost alarming how still he can make himself to accomplish a task and then in a blink be unable to stop moving. His fingers dance. “I fear I may have to leave you for a spell, Watson, unless you feel like a romantic jaunt around the streets of Brooklyn?”

“I could go for a walk.” It’s always an adventure to go out with Sherlock. He is distracted by the most bizarrely mundane things, and she finds herself having to apologise to a significant number of usually middle-aged women who tell her to keep her boyfriend under control, but she doesn’t hate the walking part.

“You don’t mind explaining our relationship to the borough’s contingency of stay at home mothers?”

Joan smiles, pressing her bandage down a little more firmly. “I think I can handle it. You never know, someone might yell at us to not make out on their porch again, that was fun. Definitely what we were doing, anyway.”

“One can only hope,” Sherlock says cheerfully, heading for the stairs. Joan watches him go for a moment before standing up herself.

It’s ridiculous, really. She doesn’t want to make out with Sherlock any more than she wants to make out with a tuna sandwich. Sherlock knows too much about what goes on inside her; how she thinks, already acts too much like a cranky husband for them to ever be successful in any kind of relationship endeavour. It would disrupt their equilibrium, and while Joan has wondered certain things once or twice on coming home from a little too much wine after family dinners, the fact that her sex life is abysmal is not a reason to ruin the months of cultivation their friendship has undergone.

She needs Sherlock to stay as he is, and though she’s seen him studying her with interest occasionally, she knows he feels the same. A friendship, for Sherlock, speaks volumes.

As she reaches the bottom of the stairs he’s waiting for her, fidgety as ever, and she is struck again by how normal this feels to her now.

He helps her into her coat, exceptionally gentle with her bandaged arm, and together they head out into the cool spring air.

 

 


End file.
